Just bought a 1660 Dyna QPS. Very intuitive and easy to drive, safely. My wife and daughters were running it after a 45 minute walk around with me.
I have shopped for almost two years looking at MF, Kubota, Kioti, Blue Kioti (Landini), JD, LS and others. MF certainly had the best hyraulic flow of all of them at lower RPMs, that's well documented in most articles you read so no surprise there. I just moved 40 yards of dirt while home, and my 1660 has Ag tires, and I didn't notice any stiffness in the steering at all. Perhaps my wife's concern over the big gaping hole I was digging in the lawn while moving the steering wheel before beginning to move distracted me but I don't remember ever experiencing stiffness in the steering.
Kioti had more lift power on their FEL on lower HP models than most others (except Landini, which has a different loader than Kioti but lists comparable numbers for lift / breakout etc). Landini is exactly the same tractor as the Kioti, and if you aren't faithful to colours it's on average 10% cheaper than the identical Kioti model. I have both dealers close to me so the decision for me would have been easy.
The 120 loader is a strong loader, moving up to the 130 on the larger 1600 series of tractors comes with more lifting capacity.
From what I was able to tell from simply playing around in the dirt piles of several different dealers, as far as HP to weight ratios in comparable tractors (loaded rears, no implements attached etc) for me it boiled down to the four, MF, Landini, LS and Kioti. If it wasn't the MF it would have been the Landini, nothing wrong with a baby blue tractor.
Oh, and my old 135 doesn't have power steering, but it doesn't have a loader either. Never had a problem with it, power steering is necessary with a loader of course, can't say as I really missed it in anything we have used the 135 for in the last 15 or so years.